A Victory for Democracy in Scotland

GLASGOW — George Washington is said to have cherished a wood snuff box from a tree that hid William Wallace from the English during the wars of independence, which eventually ended in victory for the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

About half the signatories on America’s Declaration of Independence had Scottish ancestry, and many took inspiration from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume, who wrote on Oct. 27, 1775: “I am an American in my principles, and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”

As the Scottish actor Brian Cox put it before last week’s failed bid for independence: “Scotland was indirectly responsible for the American Revolution.”

Scotland may not quite have invented democracy, but might it earn a place in the history books for reinventing it?

“Forget Bannockburn or the Scottish Enlightenment, the Scots have just reinvented and re-established the idea of true democracy,” the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh wrote. “This — one more — glorious failure might also, paradoxically, be their finest hour.”

A whiff of Scottish spring was certainly in the September air as a record 97 percent of residents registered to vote and 85 percent cast their ballots.

At a time when less than 60 percent of Americans vote in presidential elections and scarcely more than four in 10 Europeans bother with elections for the European Parliament, a generation in Scotland was inspired and politicized.

The energy was palpable during two years of town hall meetings and Facebook debates, and outside polling stations in Glasgow last week. “I felt it was my responsibility to vote,” said Angus Cole, a 35-year-old mechanic who had never cast a ballot before. He voted no to independence.

The people power behind the yes vote, which ballooned from about 30 percent two years ago to 45 percent last Thursday, has been all the more striking because opposition to independence was almost unanimous among the main political parties, business leaders and the news media. Surely, if this happened in another country, Suzanne Moore recently wrote in The Guardian, “we would be calling it a velvet revolution and marveling at democracy in action.”

Instead, the governing pro-independence Scottish National Party has been accused of populism and is routinely cited in the same breath as unsavory nationalist fringe movements.

Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian who teaches at Harvard University, wrote in The Financial Times on Monday that “we have witnessed another defeat for populism at the hands of the emergent Europewide grand coalition.”

“Populism has been popping up all over Europe since the financial crisis,” Mr. Ferguson continued, before listing a number of mostly far-right anti-immigration movements.

Over the past week, membership in the Scottish National Party has almost doubled to over 50,000, and polls suggest it could increase its majority in the Scottish Parliament further in the next election.

Popular does not necessarily mean populist and nationalism is not synonymous with immigrant-hating euroskepticism, said Mr. Cox, himself a longstanding member of the Labour Party who backed independence: “The S.N.P. has been the protector of social democracy in Scotland, that’s why people are voting for them.”

Indeed, the Scottish brand of a pro-European nationalism looks very different from the right-wing varieties blossoming elsewhere in Europe. Rather than exclusiveness, nationalists in Scotland pride themselves on American-style hyphenated identities. Everyone registered as a resident in Scotland could vote in the referendum, British citizen or not, while Scots living outside Scotland could not. There were Asian-Scots and Polish-Scots campaigning on both sides of the divide.

“This is civic nationalism, not ethnic nationalism,” explained Humza Yousaf, a Glaswegian of Pakistani descent and external affairs minister for the Scottish government.

“We have shown that this country needs to rethink politics,” he told The New York Times earlier this year. “It makes me proud to be Scottish.”